Kaleido Arts for Wellbeing: Serving Sheffield and Beyond

An interview with Katherine Blessan

Katherine Blessan got in touch with Arise to share about her work empowering people in Sheffield to improve their wellbeing through the arts. Intrigued? We were! Read on for an interview with Katherine explaining more.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself and your connection to Sheffield

My name is Katherine Blessan and I’m the wife of Blessan Babu, who wrote in the last issue of Arise magazine about creating a culture of welcome. We have two children, aged 12 and 8. I first came to Sheffield in 1999, when I worked for CLC Bookshops for six months, then having fallen in love with the city, I returned the following year to do an MA in English Literature at the University of Sheffield.

Having lived in London, then overseas and got married in between, I returned to Sheffield in 2009, already pregnant with our eldest child. I say ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ as Blessan had been rejected for a spouse visa, so we were in the middle of an unexpected appeal process.

Sheffield felt like the right place to come to as I already had connections here, it is a multicultural city, we love hills and there are lots of good churches. Blessan’s appeal tribunal took place in January 2010 and to cut a long story short, the judge overturned the original decision to reject his application. He arrived in Sheffield in March, just one month before our first child was born, and we have been here ever since. As a family, we are members of City Church Sheffield.

Q: What is Kaleido Arts for Wellbeing?

We are a start-up Community Interest Company (CIC) which has sprung out of a Christian arts network called Kaleidoscope (hence the name). It is well documented that creative arts can have a positive impact on mental health and, as Christians, we also recognise that God is the source of our creativity and He can use creativity as one route into healing. We use creative arts to bring wellbeing to people suffering as a result of war, discrimination, abuse and loss.

Q: Who’s on the team?

We have a small team of directors – myself, Sarah Holly (also from City Church Sheffield) and Jill Ball from Teeside. All three of us have a heart for the nations and for people suffering trauma and we passionately believe the arts can be used as a way to release hope, empower the voiceless and restore dignity.

Q: What do you do?

We run creative arts workshops of different types (including drumming, writing and crafts). Our workshops take people on a journey into healing through exploring themes such as being, belonging, blessings, mourning, releasing, redeeming and relating.

So far, we have run two iterations of Writing for Wellbeing in Pitsmoor, are about to start a third, and are planning to branch into the Sharrow / Endcliffe area. We have also run training on using drumming circles for wellbeing and are exploring workshops possibilities. In addition, we have partnered with an organization called Peaced Together and will be running our first craft for wellbeing workshops in the autumn in Sheffield.

In the future, we would also like to be able to offer one-to-one arts mentoring for talented people from our beneficiary groups and become financially sustainable by selling our arts workshops to interested companies and organizations.

Q: What inspired you to start this project?

I’m on the leadership team of a Christian creative network called Kaleidoscope. Back in November 2019, the guy who heads up this team, Jez Chalmers, sent us an enthusiastic video on WhatsApp sharing how he’d been talking to a GP friend of his about the power of the arts to be used as a healing tool for social prescribing. Jez posed the idea that it’d be amazing if we could set up a charity to use arts for wellbeing purposes, threw it up in the air and left it there.

My heart started pounding when I listened to this message and, for some reason, I know that God is on the case when my heart pounds with enthusiasm over an issue as it’s happened before. Nothing came out of this conversation for a few months, but the idea was brewing, then Jez called me and asked me if I’d like to take a lead on researching this idea and exploring possibilities, and that was it: I was in.

Q: What have been some high points in your journey so far?

A Muslim friend of ours took part in the drumming training in August last year led by a skilled and Spirit-filled musician called Chris Baron, and she told me that she had started the day feeling low, but by the end of it, her spirits had lifted.

In October last year, shortly after we started the Writing for Wellbeing workshops, Jennifer Vernon Edwards came and interviewed me and the participants for BBC Radio Sheffield. I was touched by the testimonials that came out including one woman saying that, “Writing enabled me to find who I am,” and another saying, “Writing has helped me so much. If I feel like I’m in pain or just struggling, rather than reaching for more pills, I’ll sit down and write for ten minutes.”

Fran Hall - one of the volunteers who has been very capably assisting me with the Writing for Wellbeing workshops - said to me that she’d found the workshops of benefit to herself personally. “It gives me life like nothing else does.” This was so encouraging to hear.

Furthermore, I am doing some training with the School for Social Entrepreneurs start-up programme, and a recent highlight was meeting all the lovely people with whom I’m training face to face in York after months of online meetings.

Q: What is your biggest challenge?

The main challenge is capacity. Although I have been working as the lead director, it is currently an unpaid role, so I am juggling that as well as needing to earn income through tutoring (I’m a qualified English teacher) and finding time to focus on my writing career, which is another calling of mine.

Q: How can Christians support the project, both now and in the future?

Prayerfully consider if you have anything that you could offer us an organization, whether time to volunteer on one of our workshops, help with communications such as sending out marketing emails, grant applications, developing course curricula etc. If this article has left your heart racing, then it could be you!

If you are working for a business or corporation, prayerfully consider whether your company could invest financially into the work we are doing. We have ambitions to expand beyond Sheffield into different areas of the UK and overseas, so please get in touch if you would like us to run some creative wellbeing workshops for your staff.

Q: Do you have any prayer requests?

Yes please! Could you pray:

• For increased capacity to enable us to grow and become a sustainable organization.

• That we may be able to bless many with our wellbeing workshops.

• That we will stay true to our Christian values and roots.

• For the resources for me to be able to receive a part-time salary.

Q: Can our readers contact you to find out more about Kaleido Arts for Wellbeing?

Absolutely! If you’d like to get in touch, please email me at kaleidoarts@protonmail.com and follow us on social media (Twitter @kaleido_arts and Facebook)